Author: Peter Mechen

Jun Bouterey-Ishido (piano)

Chamber Music Hutt Valley

JS BACH – English Suite No.1 in A BWV 806 / RAVEL – Le Tombeau de Couperin

BARTOK – Out Of Doors Suite (1926) / BRAHMS – Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel Op.24

St.Mark’s Church, Woburn, Lower Hutt

Sunday 24th July 2011

If you haven’t already done so, find a space on which to write down the name Jun Bouterey-Ishido, a space you’ll remember and can refer back to when the rest of the world catches up with this young pianist’s remarkable talent. Evidence was amply provided by this recital, filled with good things, and even more praiseworthy in that the pianist was able to make a fairly inertly-voiced instrument “sound” with plenty of the different music’s varied characters.

Jun Bouterey-Ishido sprang to pianistic prominence in 2008 when he won the Kerikeri National Piano Competition, impressing the judge, Australian virtuoso pianist and composer Ian Munro, with artistic maturity and potential far beyond his years. Born in Christchurch, Jun had studied previously with Diedre Irons, and then Peter Nagy, Gao Ping and Judith Clark, before being admitted to the Masters Programme at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, where he’s presently continuing his studies with Peter Nagy.

I was fortunate enough to have heard him play in the final round at Kerikeri, remembering in particular an exciting rendition of Ravel’s Alborado del Gracioso, and a powerfully taut reading of Schubert’s A minor Sonata D.784. Experiencing his playing again almost three years later, what freshly struck me was his engaging physical fluidity at the keyboard – if anything, even freer than before, the gestural choreography more expressive, but still in a way that focused entirely on what the music was doing. And although his aspect and mien remained remarkably boyish (most evident when acknowledging applause, his slight diffidence with that process at odds with his ease and command at the keyboard), there was a deeper, more profound effect about his playing that immediately linked his listeners’ sensibilities with the world of the music, transcending time and place, youth and experience.

It was this immediate connection which I found particularly memorable, especially throughout the recital’s first half – the pianist had evidently been thinking over his program, because he announced a change of order before he began, reversing the positions of Bartok’s Suite Out of Doors, and Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, more a case of relating these works to their other companions, I think, than to each other, and with better results. So, after a richly-hued Bach English Suite we were able to enjoy a twentieth-century refraction of further classical elegance in the form of Ravel’s parallel tributes to friends killed in the Great War, as well as to his illustrious countryman, Couperin. I couldn’t imagine a more winning amalgam of freedom and elegance, clarity and colour as we got from Bouterey-Ishido in the  Bach work. Right from the beginning the playing had that timeless quality of sculptured marble, but with the life within awakened and activated. Perhaps for some tastes his playing might have been thought too plastic, too freely-conceived (but I would urge the doubters to consider the word “Baroque” with all of its connotations!) – for me he had the gift of being able to express the “inner life” of his phrasing with, in places, the liquidity of something by Debussy, yet convert the whole into a solid, enduring structure.

Playing like Bouterey-Ishido’s I find hard to “explain”, except to use generic phrases like “infectious” and “spontaneous” – his command of rhythmic gait seemed to have an entirely natural kind of impulsive motivation, a symbiotic process of music and performer creatively interacting. In fact this Bach-playing  gave me so much pleasure, i now find it hard to tear myself away from thinking and writing about it. Fortunately, Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin inhabits a world of similar poise and elegance, partly through its ostensible connections with earlier times, and partly due to the fastidiousness of the work’s creator. Here I noticed from the outset how, more than with his Bach-playing, the pianist’s decorative impulses were somehow tighter, their “filigree whiplashings” reminding me of the playing of Rachmaninov’s in his recordings – the notes are all there, but they’re delivered with the swiftest and deftest of touches! Bouterey-Ishido has the technique to generate larger-scaled vortices of impulse, whirlpools of sound that can clear like torrents of water cascading over rocks and turning to spray, an exhilarating effect at the conclusion of the Prelude to the Suite. A beautifully-modulated Fugue was followed by the perennially bitter-sweet Forlane, the rhythms kept beautifully steady, allowing the sounds to “flesh out” the available spaces and suggest plenty of orchestral colour in places.  And the Rigadoun was, here, a joyous irruption of energies set against moments of introspection, different states of being rubbing shoulders with one another.

But the emotional heart of this suite is the Menuet, delicately begun by Bouterey-Ishido with finely-poised tones, inexorably moved along in processional mode and expanded into a grand archway of feeling – from these big, rolling sounds the emotion was nicely gathered in, the mask of feeling re-adjusted and the delicacy of the opening re-established, concluding with a wistful, almost other-worldly tremolando figure. By contrast the brilliant Toccata carried both rhythmic drive and rhapsodic asymmetry along its exuberant course, well captured by the pianist, revelling in the opportunities for orchestral weight and brilliance.

After this, the “earthiness” of Bartok’s Out of Doors Suite came as a bit of an aural shock, albeit an exhilarating one. No aural quarter was given by Bouterey-Ishido throughout the opening “With Drums and Pipes”, the succeeding “Barcarolla” seeming almost to creep out from behind the shelters after the opening onslaught, establishing uneasy undulations and dark-browed, short-breathed melodies. The pianist resolutely took to the insistent patterning of the “Musettes” – a strangely claustrophobic evocation for an out-of-doors piece. By contrast the dark of night’s spaces was all-enveloping in Bouterey-Ishido’s hands throughout “Musiques nocturnes”, the loneliness exacerbated by snatches of folk-melody wandering throughout the dark. All the stops were pulled out for the concluding “Chase”, the pianist’s reserves of strength and energy put to overwhelming, almost cataclysmic use.

The interval gave us all a chance to properly digest the already meaty substance of the first half’s fare, before tackling what had seemed on paper like the recital’s main course, Brahms’ magnificent Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel. If not the Everest of the romantic piano literature, the work belongs among the highest of the pianistic Alps; and it requires a robust amalgam of virtuoso bravura, visionary zeal and poetic sensibility to bring off. One of the work’s difficulties for the performer is judging the extent to which each variation ought to be characterized according to its own intrinsic nature while making certain of the overall continuity, the inexorable progress towards the imposing fugue that snow-caps the structure’s magnificence. How much virtuoso bravura, classical clarity, or poetic feeling is needed at any given point, and with watt effect upon the overall structure? Happily for the performer, the “greater than ever can be played” rule applies to this work with a vengeance – its possibilities and potentialities for different expression are immense.

Had I been blindfolded and taken to this recital I might not have guessed the pianist’s age throughout the first half of the concert; but throughout the Brahms piece I found myself thinking, “A young man’s performance….” Everything was very direct, presented surely and unequivocally, an approach which brought out a certain purposeful unity to the variations, even if it sacrificed some of the subtleties and depth of expression of some of the pieces. The very opening, played with bright, forthright insouciance, had an extrovert quality that reflects a youthful view of the world, and the variations were entered upon with that same spirit of joie de vivre, knitting the theme and variation together, and completely eschewing the “motorcycle kick-start” launching of that first variation (a flash of virtuoso delight in rhetorical gesture which bubbles to the surface now and then in some performances). Bouterey-Ishido commanded the big guns necessary to deal commandingly with the octaves of Variation 4, though I thought he rushed No.7, smudging and losing a bit of detail. Here, and in the delicious Variation 10 a touch of impatience indicated that perhaps not every note of this work has quite gotten under his “skin”. The second of two deep bell-tolling variations was splendid, however, with the pianist again “snapping” his decorative figurations excitedly and urgently.

Against the occasional moments where I felt the music propelled a shade over-impetuously (the “hunting horn” Variation (No.14) had an almost manic, rather than an heroic, aspect) were the episodes, such as the Sicilienne-like No.18, Mediterranean in impulse, but with a lovely warm Germanic feeling brought to the playing; and the beautifully elusive, rather Schumannesque No.21, whose performances inhabited the music’s spaces with the conviction of complete ownership. Bouterey-Ishido fearlessly plunged into the waters of the final three variations, taking them in a single breath, perhaps sacrificing some of the music’s cumulative power to momentary excitement, but certainly with exhilarating results, the occasional splashiness part of the process. And his playing of the fugue was splendid, nicely arched towards the moment when the cascading bells break forth and flood the sound-vistas with a wonderful sense of arrival and fulfillment.

There’ll come a time when Jun Bouterey-Ishido’s playing of this work will fuse even more deeply with the music – but equally to be cherished is the here-and-now of his youthful whole-heartedness and remarkable physical and technical ease at the keyboard – I know of no other pianist who looks more “at home” with himself and his world when playing. The recital was rounded, in Shakespeare-like fashion, by “a little sleep” – a short but beautiful and dreamy piece by Kodaly whose title I missed hearing, thanks to rain which had begun to fall heavily onto the church’s roof.

SCHUBERT – Piano Sonata in G Major D.894 / Piano Sonata in B-flat D.960

Michael Houstoun (piano)

Mulled Wine Concert Series / Memorial Hall, Paekakariki

Sunday, July 17th, 2011

Waiting outside the Memorial Hall in a July afternoon’s wintry sunshine at Paekakariki was for me a kind of poetry in itself, colored partly by the expectation of hearing live performances of two of Schubert’s greatest piano sonatas, but also by the ambience of the open spaces, rugged hills to the east, and the beach and distantly lovely Kapiti Island to the west. I’ll doubtless be accused of “event-dropping” here, but I was reminded by all of this of my visit to the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk (too many years previously that I care to number!), where one finds a similar “homely” aspect to many of the concert venues, and the same rural outdoor “far-from-the-big-city” atmosphere that gives to the whole enterprise such distinction.

Inside the hall at Paekakariki, the excitement-buzz was palpable, the sense of an occasion somehow made more manifest by the community-hall nature of the venue – a kind of “music is where you find it” spirit that, as I’ve said, heightens the special nature of the event. I was not aware of Michael Houstoun having any previous significant association with the solo piano music of Schubert, and so this for me seemed to add to the concert’s specialness. Naturally, I knew Houstoun had recently performed with tenor Keith Lewis the great “Winterreise” song-cycle, as well as the “Trout” Quintet as part of Chamber Music New Zealand’s “Schubertiade” – so I found myself keenly anticipating the pianist bringing his own unique qualities as a performer to music I’ve loved for much of my listening life.

First up, and I think rightly so, was the G Major Sonata D.894. Like its recital companion, the B-flat Sonata, it’s a work whose first movement alone, when played with the repeat can dwarf in sheer size and scope the movements which follow, especially in the hands of an interpreter who emphasizes the music’s potential for what Robert Schumann famously called its “heavenly length”. Perhaps taking its cue from Schumann’s observation, there’s a school of interpretation that advocates the most spacious of tempi over certain of Schubert’s movements, more pronounced, I think, than with any other classical composer. But as with all great music, there are diametrically opposed notions regarding how it should be played, ranging from those rooted in abstraction and severity of symphonic form, to ideas which advance the feeling that Schubert’s work should all be thought of as subservient to song, since (following this line of thinking) he was a lyricist, and not symphonic in outlook, and that his structures should be regarded as little more than somewhat naively-extended melodies.

Michael Houstoun’s playing of the sonata’s opening suggested a course that took into account both structural awareness and lyrical impulse on the composer’s part. We heard at the outset phrases given plenty of air and space, richly-toned and with leading lines sung out, along with strong, well-focused chordings and clearly-etched melodic patterns, suggesting that the pianist took the idea of Schubert the long-term symphonic thinker seriously, though without, it must be said, going to the extremes of profundity attempted by the likes of pianist Sviatoslav Richter. Houstoun, to my ears, sought from within the movement a judicious balance between profundity and momentum that found the best of both the intellectual and emotional worlds of the music. Throughout the introductory paragraphs he differentiated the different voices with considerable sensitivity, withdrawing his tone for the minor-key utterance, and warming it with slightly more body for its repetition in the major mode – as well, he beautifully energized the music at the point where it consciously begins to pulsate, the melody subtly detailed (a slight finger-slip in the filigree right-handed runs possibly the result of the phrasing being, I felt, a shade too “stiff”, more an etched pattern than a dance), the rhythm given sufficient girth to remain relatively light upon its feet. I thought Houstoun’s observation of the repeat just that wee bit more exploratory and expansive – if, this time round, the filigree runs in the right hand seemed freer and more dance-like, there was also an added hymn-like quality to some of the more chordal utterances, very much a feeling, one could say, of a “song of the earth”.

The rest of the movement was as fine in Houstoun’s hands, with only a touch of “bluntness” at some of the phrase-ends suggesting that there were still a couple of corners of the work he hadn’t yet negotiated with complete ease. Largely his approach to the darker, stormier development was lean and forward-looking, more agitated than tragic in feeling, building up the chordal sequences impressively, but playing with translucent tones that never threatened to crush the music under its own weight. The lead-back to the opening was nicely “breathed”, as was the coda, the music’s “homecoming” aspect given plenty of songful feeling. The slow movement’s first few phrases energized the stasis of the first movement’s conclusion, almost too much so, I thought at first, thinking that those wonderful phrases weren’t being encouraged to “flower” with sufficient poetry – but as the music progressed, so did I warm more to the playing, thanks to the flexibility and subtlety of the pianist’s rubato. The music’s key-change brought a big-boned contrast, but also some beautifully pliant phrasings in the gentler responses – Houstoun actually surprised me with his readiness to yield in places, getting a lot out of the music with his beautifully nuanced contourings.

I liked the Scherzo’s characterful dancings, the pianist bringing out the music’s lilting qualities and playing the grace-notes that punctuate the line with great “point” and care. He illuminated the melodic line of the Trio with nicely-stressed harmonies and counter-lines, enjoying the music’s contrasts as the scherzo’s chords lurched back into the soundscape. As for the finale, the playing had all the rhythmic buoyancy one could have wished for (was there a touch of hesitancy over the transition into the “running” sequence?), with everything nicely pointed and dovetailed; and then, during the stormier minor-key sequences, plenty of invigorating “schwung” to muscle up the interplay and keep the momentum going right through to the opening’s return. After these exertions, the coda was like balm for the senses, a hugely satisfied exhalation which Schubert (and Houstoun) seemed to invite all of us to join in with. At the end of all of this there was general pleasure in demonstrating our appreciation of the performance, though I have to say that Houstoun’s playing of the sonata divided opinion in my party, a situation which always invigorates discussion and sharpens all kinds of critical evaluations, both in the process and its conclusions. A friend whose opinion I respect thought the playing up to this point “all head and no heart”. But I couldn’t agree, as witness what I’ve written so far; and, for myself, I thought it was a truly praiseworthy performance.

Having said this, I had to admit, at the conclusion of the concert’s second half, that the B-flat Sonata demonstrated Houstoun’s interpretative depth and identification with the music to an extent that the G Major’s performance, good though it was, didn’t quite achieve. From first note to last, Schubert’s final and greatest piano sonata brought out what I felt was a powerful and comprehensive understanding on the pianist’s part. Even when I wanted parts of the music played a slightly different way (softer, more yielding paragraphs in one or two places), Houstoun’s conviction regarding what he was doing was such at the time that his interpretation carried all before it, the result being an entirely convincing and marvellously played performance.

Right from the beginning, the music seemed to carry whole worlds of inward feeling, Houstoun’s treatment of the chordal melody sounding and feeling almost Brucknerian in its weighty expansiveness, the vistas opening up to accommodate the tones generated by those big repeated chords which grow beneath the melody’s repetition. Not as nuanced as, and much more insistent than the music for the G major Sonata, these were more direct and forthright sounds, dealing, as Houstoun himself would probably say, in fundamental material – and no more so than at the repeat, where it might seem to the uninitiated listener as though the basic fabric of the music is being threatened by some kind of “horror from the deep” – a critical episode in the work’s discourse, here brought off by the pianist with suitably awe-inspiring power and concentration. The development brought layer upon layer of intensification, leading to what I’ve always regarded as the “stricken” passage, repeated chords sounded underneath a minor-key melody, before the opening theme returns, stalked by its trill ominously rumbling away in the bass. By the time the opening was properly reconstituted, the work had truly become “road music”, the vistas opened right out in Houstoun’s hands, the momentum kept up, the soul inexorably continuing upon its journey, bequeathing us those richly voiced chords at the movement’s end.

What a lovely colour Houstoun gave the opening of the slow movement! – its tolling bell aspect was beautifully and sensitively weighted, equivocally poised between worlds of foreboding and resignation. The music carried easefully into the major-key episode, the pianist’s rhythmic trajectories both focused and flexible throughout. Contrasting with this was the scherzo’s lightness of touch, set around and about an angular trio with Houstoun bringing out some startlingly effective bass-line accents. The playful and propulsive finale also harboured contrasting energies, the explosive mid-stream outbursts very much in keeping with the movement’s volatile character, as were the angular polyphonics leading up to the final energy-gathering pauses, and the torrents of abandonment which concluded the work. And my friend’s reaction to Houstoun’s playing of the B-flat Sonata? – words to the effect of “Well, he really nailed that one!”…..and when all’s said and done, I can’t really sum it up better than that!

DIEDRE IRONS  (piano)

– presented by the Waikanae Music Society Inc.

BEETHOVEN – Piano Sonata in C Op.2 No.3

CHOPIN – 2 Nocturnes Op.27 / Fantasy in F Minor

WHITEHEAD – Tūmanako: Journey through an unknown landscape

RAVEL – Le Tombeau de Couperin

Memorial Hall, Waikanae

Sunday 19th June 2011

To describe Diedre Irons’ piano playing as “thoroughly engaging” might seem to some too much of an all-purpose, over-generalized comment, out-of-step with more serious analysis of the kind one associates with a “proper” review. However, I think this quality of engagement is intrinsic to any discussion of a musician’s work as a performer in front of an audience. Irons seems incapable of playing a mechanical or dissociated phrase, so that for me it seems to all flow like life-blood, activating and sustaining for the listener whole worlds of feelings, ideas, impulses and actions.

In my ideal world I would want to hear Diedre Irons play all the Beethoven piano sonatas – I know that the great Rachmaninov once said that he didn’t play many of these works because “the Beethoven sonatas contain everything, and no one pianist can play everything”…..but I’ve often thanked my lucky stars that musicians such as Schnabel, Kempff, Arrau, and Barenboim (and, of course, our own Michael Houstoun), to name but a few, have ignored Rachmaninov’s dictum and performed them all, both in public and on record. Yes, Rachmaninov was right, in the sense that, as Artur Schnabel famously said, “These are works that are better than can ever be played”, and any pianist who essays the complete set of them has to cover an enormous technical, intellectual and emotional range of responses. But it can be done most rewardingly, and on the evidence of Irons’ playing for us the delicious C Major Op.2 No.3 Sonata with what seemed like a comprehensive grasp of the work’s expressive possibilities, I would welcome hearing more from her – in fact, as many as she wants to play.

Within just a few measures of the music’s opening, Irons had generously given us as many shades of expression as would a gifted Shakespearean actor on stage in one of the plays. Each note took on a meaning of its own, the phrases enlivened, the paragraphs taking us on a journey whose course featured many details of continuity and contrast, as befitted the work of a young, and wanting-to-impress composer. Irons brought forth warm, enthusiastic accents rather than overtly muscular contrasts, so that the music often smiled, and the minor-key exertions sallied forth beneath a firm, but elastic touch. Towards the end of the movement, from the recitative-like passages came an adroitly-pedalled foretaste of both the Tempest and Waldstein Sonatas, the pianist bringing out the work’s connections within a more widely-spanned context in a totally natural and unforced way.

The remainder of the sonata similarly enchanted us – a guarded, somewhat understated second-movement opening grew towards a marriage of delicacy and resonance, the right-handed figurations dancing over the step-wise columns rising from the bass regions; while Irons nicely contrasted the third movement’s interplay of mischievous and vertiginous trajectories with those wonderfully rolling arpeggiations in the trio. Contrast was also the order of the day for the finale, the gentle playfulness of Irons’ delivery of the opening a perfect foil for the grand and heroic second subject – a case of humor and delicacy alternating with bigger-boned statements, culminating in a teasing coda and a grand-slam final payoff!

Chopin’s two Op.27 Nocturnes which followed gave an impression of being two different “takes” of a similar view, a night-and-day contrast, for example, the C-sharp Minor all half-lit suggestiveness under Irons’ fingers, a shade exotic in its lyrical character, the opening sharply brought into focus with urgent toccata-like chordings, whose impulses of energy dissipate almost as rapidly as they rise up, allowing a “homecoming” coda of great beauty to steal in over the final bars. No such exoticisms trouble the second Nocturne in D-flat, whose more overly vocal lines describe an archway of melodic beauty and intensity, echoed by a “dying fall” as affecting in its way as its companion’s. Both works were here brought to life, not only as companions but as entities in themselves.

Insightful programming had the great Fantasy in F Minor placed after the two Nocturnes, with the audience taking up its cue and allowing the pianist an unbroken path towards the new work’s first sounds – the expectant tread of the opening in keeping with the composer’s intention of taking his listeners to the heart of a world of spontaneously-conceived feeling and incident. Very much like a Polish version of the Hungarian “lassu” at the beginning, the Fantasy then sweeps into and through episodes of vivid storytelling, Irons revelling in particular episodes such as the “storm and stress” arpeggiated flourishes, some magical arabesques of transformation, and then a hymn-like, almost devotional rapture, the whole quite Lisztian in its range and scope, though still Chopinesque in accent throughout.

I’d heard Gillian Whitehead’s Tūmanako: Journey through an unknown landscape on a previous occasion, at the “Sounztender” concert in May of last year, played by the same pianist. In a concert with established classics, the piece took on a different “feeling” for me to what it did on the previous occasion when played alongside some of its contemporaries. This time round the music seemed to me more abstract in effect than before, the result, perhaps, of my bringing some kind of expectation to the performance of the “we’ve heard the sounds – now, how well do they cohere?” variety. At the outset there were vast spaces, created as much by wide leaps between resonating notes as by the frequent silences, from which came various impressions of fleeting encounters, cascades of bitter-sweet arpeggiations, chordal evocations, cries of birds and other nature sounds, both tumbling downwards and taking flight. In places I felt a sense of reverence and an awareness of ritual, a feeling advanced by full-throated, bell-like soundings of things paying a kind of homage to a state of being, and an activation of the spirit.

A different kind of evocation came from Ravel in his Le Tombeau de Couperin, a tribute from one French master to the work of another. It took me a while to get onto the performance’s wavelength, to my surprise – although Irons played the Prelude with suitably motoric impulse, the dynamic terracings for me somehow lacked light and shade, the hall’s lack of resonance perhaps to blame for an ambience more clear-eyed than atmospheric. Only with the deliciously bitter-sweet Forlane did I begin to make connections with it all, increasingly beguiled by the changing faces of the music’s droll, but suggestive “revolve”. Irons gave the Rigadoun’s opening plenty of jack-in-the-box energy, nudging the succeeding trio episode along, with its deliciously “limping” rhythms, before the opening orchestrally crashes back. And nowhere was Ravel’s wistful mix of artifice and feeling more beautifully conveyed by Irons than in the Menuet’s astringent strains, the mask hiding the composer’s true feelings never more apparent. I thought the pianist resisted the blandishments of sheer virtuosity with the concluding Toccata, her rhythmic trajectories instead enabling the piece’s tempo fluctuations to grow out of one another and have a cumulative effect of energy and brilliance.

A Debussy piece to finish help return us to our lives – the audience’s appreciation of and regard for Diedre Irons’ playing was, at the end, a pleasure to join in with.